I Am Being Plagiarized.
Published on April 7, 2016
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
I make it a habit to read a few web pages from new members of the Wealthy Affiliate community to offer advice. Most are not aware of this. To my surprise I saw quite a bit of my content, word for word, list for list, on a couple other websites within the community. Imagine my chagrin.
My first though was that these unfortunate persons that did it must be inexperienced. If they were experienced they would know that there isn't a better way to kill search engine ranking than duplicate copy. I felt sympathy.
It's happened to me before in an academic setting but this is a first since I started here at Wealthy Affiliate. My reaction when I discovered this might not be what you would expect and probably not typical.
I smiled. Then, I must admit, I felt my head begin to swell just a little bit. I was proud. To think that another person, although inexperienced, thought that my content was good enough to steal. Sadly they are probably mistaken.
Ready to put this into action?
Start your free journey today — no credit card required.
There are writer's online that are much more worthy than I too have their copy stolen. Jon Morrow, Brian Clark, Henneke Duistermaat, Neil Patel, Sally Hogshead and on and on.
There are writers right here at WA that I am sure have better, more convert-able copy than I. I won't name them out of respect for their privacy.
The names above are already in the public domain. With this in mind I was feeling warm all over with these people thinking that my copy was worth taking.
For that I say thank you. It makes me feel good. It also makes me a little sad for the people that did it. Once the search engines detect duplicate content on their website it's going to make it harder for that site to rank well. And as we all know ranking is hard enough. So here's some advice. Take it or not.
It is better for your business and website to have terrible content than to have the best content there is if that best content is on another website dated before yours. Oh yea, by the way.
Leaving all that aside, thank you for the compliment of theft. Strangely, I appreciate it.
Share this insight
This conversation is happening inside the community.
Join free to continue it.The Internet Changed. Now It Is Time to Build Differently.
If this article resonated, the next step is learning how to apply it. Inside Wealthy Affiliate, we break this down into practical steps you can use to build a real online business.
No credit card. Instant access.